Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Working across a large organisation inevitably leads to people using different drive letters when mapping drives/folders. This makes sharing workflows and macros with other teams more difficult and the first thing I do when creating a new workflow is change the dependencies to All UNC.

This suggestion is to offer the option to default all workflows to UNC via the user settings. Acknowledging that some users will prefer listing files by drive letter and other UNC, adding the option could make life a little bit easier for everyone.

When models are complex and extensive, it can be difficult to locate specific sections of a workflow despite any effort to organize the tools. I believe that it would be beneficial to have a feature that saves focused views of the model, e.g. zoomed into a specific location or set of tools, with a configuration of expanded or contracted containers.

The intent would not to affect the data flow but rather facilitate the data analyst's movement within the file.

Please see the (simple) example below, where the zone if red could be a saved view, onto which the screen would zoom and shift when selected.

Hi Dev team,

As well as this much needed UI feature to scroll through workflows https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Scrolling-functionality-added-to-Workflow-sh...

Could you please change the order of workflow names in the 'Active Documents' button to be ordered in the same order as the workflow tabs and not alphabetically as it currently is?

When you have more than 5 workflows open (or less if they have long names) it's so tricky to quickly and easily cycle through them to find the ones you need. This is especially important when demoing, training and presenting to others!

Thanks,

Joe

I rarely use the Group By tab on batch macros, but it's unfortunately always the first tab that pops up. When I have a questions tab on a batch macro, it would be great if it appeared first (ie I should see the questions tab when I click on my batch macro.) Thanks!

May I suggest that you include a facility to word wrap the cell viewer in a browse. When working with long OuterXML strings, for example, it would be very useful to see the full extent of the string. 

Thank you

I would like to be able to have the Map Tool to change the Reference Base Map to Tom Tom CA if there is a Country column in the incoming data stream that reads "CAN".  Or change the Expand Extent from the default 10(%) to the number that's in a column called "Extent".

Right now I can only do it using the Macro interface tool, but I still have to make my selection after I select which data point(s) I'm using.

I want it to generate specific-format maps based on the input data I provide, so it could run automatically.

I guess, aside from the Spatial Field, Grouping Field, Thematic Field, and Label Fields, I'd love a Configurations Field(s).

When utilizing the alteryx 'publish to tableau server' tool, only the name of the folder (project name) is visible for selection of where to publish the .hyper file on the tableau server.  When there are multiple folders with the same name under different parent folders, i.e. a 'weekly updates' folder under North America parent, a weekly updates folder under South America parent, etc... there is no way to differentiate between the 'weekly updates' folders in the tableau publish tool. 

In this case, you essentially have to publish test files to all the folders and write the results on a piece of paper for future reference.  

This request is to enable the navigation, or at least view, of a hierarchical folder structure within the 'publish to tableau server' tool.  

The below solution requires a refresh on the explorer box, which is no better than using a browse tool.  Would be great if the explorer box (or something similar) could give a preview of the data output from any icon.  This would be great for tweaking parameters in a workflow to see instant results on any outputs.

Administrators in the License Downloads Portal - for a specific License group - should be able to add or remove other admins to the License group. 

There is a check box against the name of the user - to select admin rights - but existing admins are not able to save the changes made. 

@Kosi @SeanAdams 

While Alteryx allows for a proxy username and password in the settings, these are not passed properly to an NTLM proxy. Support for NTLM authentication would be incredibly useful for a number of corporations who utilize this firewall setup.

We currently have to either download via Python or cURL through batch commands called by Alteryx. Since Alteryx uses a cURL back-end, this should be a fairly simple addition to the existing download tool by allowing a selection of proxy server, port, and authentication method in addition to the proxy username and password. This could be done either in the tool itself or in User Settings.

It would be great if it were easier to add a comment tool to the canvas. As I think about what my workflows are lacking, it's good documentation. My biggest hurdle...is myself. I am simply too lazy to stop what I'm doing and add comment tools. What if you could either 1) double click on the canvas and it brings in a comment tool where I can start writing comments or 2) add a Keyboard short cut in order to add a comment tool (control + shift + C perhaps)? Either of these would help me build better documented workflows.

We have a need to be able to trace the lineage of fields being processed through Alteryx - and it has to be done at a field level to satisfy our regulator.   In essence, we have to be able to show exactly where a particular field came from, and demonstrate that we can trust this field.   NOTE: If we could do this - then we could also use this information to make EVERY canvas faster, by checking for unused fields and making suggestions to remove these unused fields early in the flow.

In order to do this - it would be great if there were an option to force explicit field names in the Alteryx XML so that we can trace a specific field.

• Alteryx currently only makes a note of a field name if it is changing that field which is very economical - but it makes tracing fields impossible.
• Desire is for every tool to write the field list to the XML definition for every field that it knows about (just like it looks in the UI)

cc: @AdamR_AYX @jpoz @Claje 

Example:

Here's a simple canvas:

- 3 fields coming in from an input

- Select tool with these 3

- output of three fields into a file

These three fields are not mentioned anywhere in the XML

The Tableau Hyper API supports regular SQL queries, see https://help.tableau.com/current/api/hyper_api/en-us/reference/sql/index.html and https://help.tableau.com/current/api/hyper_api/en-us/docs/hyper_api_reference.html for more information. Being able to use the In-database tools for querying Hyper would let us take advantage of Hyper's internal optimizations just like other databases.

Tableau's Hyper file structure can store multiple tables and the published Hyper API exposes a SQL interface. Therefore instead of supporting the standard file-based interface (like text, Excel, etc.) for connecting to Hyper files how about supporting the database server interface used for MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, etc. so we can select the schema, tables, fields, or even write SQL?

Two related ideas:

Supporting alternative schema & table names: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Input-tool-Support-more-than-Extract-Extract...

Supporting multiple table extracts: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Input-tool-support-multiple-table-extracts-f... to support multiple table extracts for the Input

Jonathan

Alteryx 2019.4 introduced support for Tableau's .hyper extract format, however it only supports single table extracts. .hyper files have supported multiple tables since mid-2018, so I'd like Alteryx to support that as well.

Here are a couple of current use cases (as of February 2020) and one future one.

- We have malaria incidence data that is joined to multiple sets of spatial data. Doing all of the joins in the extract creation process to build a single table extract is not possible due to processing time & memory constraints, so we use a multiple-table extract.

- There are multiple ways to do row level security in Tableau. A common way is to have separate tables for the data & the entitlements and then use calculations at run-time to filter the data, and for that having a multiple table extract is ideal.

- In 2020 Tableau will be introducing new data modeling capabilities (this was first demoed at the 2018 Tableau Conference, there were sessions on it at the 2019 Tableau Conference) where one goal is vastly improved performance for large fact table to fact table joins where previously we'd have to do much more data preparation. This is another case where multiple table extracts would be useful.

I've attached a sample Hyper file with two tables in the extract (it's zipped because the Community site doesn't accept .hyper files).

Supporting alternative schema and table names in Hyper extracts https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Input-tool-Support-more-than-Extract-Extract... is a prerequisite for this because by definition multiple table extracts have multiple table names.

A related idea is supporting multiple table extracts for the Output tool: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Support-multiple-table-extracts-in-the-Table...

Jonathan

Alteryx 2019.4 added support in the Input tool for Tableau .hyper extract files. The tables stored in the .hyper files have a schema and a table name. Tableau's old .tde files and Hyper files created by Alteryx & Tableau Desktop use "Extract.Extract" as the schema.tablename. However when using Tableau's Hyper API the default schema is "public" and the table name is arbitrarily specified by the user or application.

This has two impacts:

1) Without this support Alteryx can't open many .hyper files created by other applications. By way of example I've attached a sample .hyper file (in a .zip because the community software doesn't allow .hyper files) that has the schema.tablename "public.table1".

2) Also support for names beyond Extract.Extract is required in order to support multiple table extracts (submitted as a separate Idea).

Please update the Input tool so the user can select the particular schema and table name from the .hyper file.

Jonathan

The Select tool already has some really useful column rename options like add & remove prefix.  Please add uppercase & title case to these options.  I know I could do this with the Dynamic Rename Tool, but this will involve adding two tools if I'm already doing other select type options like removing fields.  Anyway, I'm assuming this would be an easy add for the DEV team and would make my life a little easier! 

Many thanks!

I would like to see an included select window for (nearly) all tools. Sometimes almost half of my workflow are select tools because I try to minimize my data and improve naming as much as possible.

Example:

1) Removing unnecessary columns

2) Removing Lat/Long columns

3) Removing not needed columns from distance tool.

Another example would be the typical usage of cross-tab. In 90% of my cross-tab usage, I put a select tool behind it.

I think it would be good to have an included select window in nearly all tools. There are probably tools that don't need them, but I think it would be a good addition to many tools.

I would suggest to add an included select tool for (at least) these tools:

- Input Data

- Cross-tab

- Tile

- Formula

- Multi-Row Formula

- Multi-Field Formula

- Text To Columns

- Cross Tab

- Transpose

- Create Points

- Distance

- Trade Area

- ... 

the SQL Editing screen has recently been changed (thank you @JPoz  and team!) - and now has syntax indenting and keyword coloring.

Could I ask that you make a minor change in the indenting, where the on part is indented underneath the Join?

Select

    Field1,

    Field2,

    field3

from

    Table1

    inner join table2

        On Table1.key = table2.key

        and table1.keyb = table2.keyb

    inner join table3

        on table3.key = table1.key

        and table3.date = table1.date